CONCEPT
Mimetic Desire
René Girard's theory that human beings do not want autonomously but learn what to want by imitating one another—the mechanism behind competition, rivalry, and much of the violence of human history—which Peter Thiel applied as his master key to markets and which becomes, in the age of AI, the diagnosis of what a consensus machine does to civilization's capacity to want anything genuinely new.
Mimetic desire is René Girard's account of the hidden engine of human motivation: that human beings do not want things autonomously, out of some inner compass of authentic preference, but learn what to want by imitating one another. The mechanism is so pervasive and so automatic that most people experience their borrowed desires as their own. Desire follows a triangular structure: subject, model, and object. The subject does not desire the object directly; he desires it because a model desires it, and the model's desire is what makes the object desirable. This imitation pulls people into convergence—everyone modeling their wants on the wants around them—until the shared desire for the same scarce object curdles into rivalry and conflict. The model and the subject, having desired the same thing, become rivals, and the rivalry
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